Hi, I am very much inexperienced with electrics so don't worry I will not be completing this job myself - I am just looking for some information while planning a project. Layman's terms where you can please. I am planning on knocking down and rebuilding my garage. There is currently power supplied to the garage however, it doesn't seem clear how. There is no 'garage' circuit in the consumer unit. Given the state of other electrics dealt with in this house - the living room ring main bypassing the fuse box entirely for example - it wouldn't surprise us that it's simply an extension of an existing ring main of sockets. The new building will be a wood workshop and will therefore need power. There will be a low power lighting circuit and I need enough juice to use power tool and a shop vacuum at the same time. I'm trying to price everything up before we make a start and have come stumped around the electrical connections area. It's my understanding - correct me if I'm wrong - that a cable needs to be run from the existing consumer unit in the house, out to the workshop. This needs to be buried in armoured conduit etc. But my main concern is with the consumer unit. There is only 1 blank left, and it seems to be labelled as not being covered by an RCD (it is to the right of the RCDs). My question, finally, is would an electrician add an MCB to this blank, and run a wire outside (following code re burying/warning tape etc, simple as that? or are there other issues I am missing i.e. for each circuit in the workshop there needs to be a separate cable from the house? or we need a larger consumer unit for the additional circuits as it needs to also be covered by an RCD? etc etc? Any and all help is very much appreciated!
It sounds to me as if you need to get an Electrician in to perform an EICR to check on the current state of the electrics, before you start modifying it. What do you mean by "the living room ring main bypassing the fuse box" ? Has that been fixed?
Yes don't worry. We came to replace sockets in the living room, flicked the consumer unit off and the TV stayed on! The majority of issues have been sorted. We are doing the bathroom before we do the workshop and its under the bathroom floor the cables leading to the garage simply emerge from the wall - so we should be able to answer the final mystery. Once this is done we will get it all double checked.
Not the best way. Have your electrician split the tails and take a supply to the garage through a switchfuse - keep it off the house CU altogether. If you really did turn off the main switch on the only CU which you have and some sockets stayed on you need to get that looked into asap. As in phone an electrician tomorrow morning. You might be safe, and only stealing electricity from next door. Or you might have a socket circuit with no protection whatsoever other than the supply fuse. Which would be a very bad thing.